Transformers: Age of Extinction Is an Empty Assault on the Senses

What is a Transformer? I ask that not only because it’s the existential question dumbly prodded at in the new film Transformers: Age of Extinction, but because I genuinely don’t know anymore. By the end of Michael Bay’s nearly three-hour film, a painfully dull opera of senseless explosions and gross gender tropes, I honestly had no idea what the hell anything meant. Not that Bay and his screenwriter, Ehren Kruger, are really invested in what any of it means, but still. I would want some real answers if I could muster up the energy to care.

There’s a story somewhere in this movie. Do you want to know what it is? Fine. So, it’s been five years since the Battle of Chicago, from the third Transformers movie, and Shia LaBeouf’s character is nowhere to be seen. Instead we’ve got Mark Wahlberg, playing a robotics-obsessed inventor from rural Texas. And if there are two things everyone thinks of when they think of Mark Wahlberg, it’s “science” and “Texas,” so already this movie is off to a logical start. Wahlberg’s character, named Cade Yeager for some reason, has a teenage daughter, Tessa, who’s smart and kind, but fed up with her dad’s scattershot, broke-ass existence. She’s the exasperated caregiver in the household, because her mom died a while back, and some woman’s gotta feed Cade, right?

Tessa, played by Nicola Peltz, is costumed in the style of many a Bay girl before her, with very short jean shorts and very tight tank tops and silly high-heeled boots and pouty pink lip gloss, all fashioning her as the innocently teasing sexpot next door. I don’t know if Michael Bay had a babysitter as a kid whom he’s still lusting after or what, but his obsession with this particular type, these Daisy Duke’d madonna-whore hybrids, is increasingly gross and unsettling. The fetishistic costuming and leering camera work would be one thing if any of these characters had any sort of agency, but they never do. Here Tessa is simply fought over by the two men in her life, overprotective daddy and hot stud racer boyfriend, Shane (Jack Reynor). Oh, I guess she gets scared sometimes, too. And has to be rescued. Those are the other two things she does.

Anyway. Robots. Then the robots come. Cade buys what he thinks is an old junkheap truck (from a fey-voiced, mincing guy whom Wahlberg scares with his tough-talk) only to quickly realize that it’s a Transformer. See, post–Battle of Chicago, a super-secret wing of the C.I.A., led by Kelsey Grammer, has been hunting down all the Transformers. Not just the evil Decepticons, but the humanity-protecting Autobots too. So they’ve gone into hiding, and this big ol’ broken-down truck farmer Cade just bought? It’s a dang Autobot. Or rather it’s the Autobot, Optimus Prime, the leader of these noble aliens. Once the government gets wind that O.P. is hiding out at Wahlburger’s, all hell breaks loose and the long, awful slog to the end credits begins. Along the way we meet another kind of robot alien who is some sort of bounty hunter desperate to catch Optimus, and we meet Stanley Tucci, playing a Steve Jobs–styled industrialist who has learned the secret to making Transformers, which would make the old Transformers obsolete.

So, again, what are the Transformers? You can just make them, and control them? I guess the new Transformers that Stanley Tucci is making are clones, like the clones in Attack of the Clones? Also the bounty hunter seems to be working for the entity that made the original Transformers, so I guess everyone’s making Transformers these days? It’s really hard to tell. And why do the Transformers turn into brand-name cars again? Specifically, why would the intergalactic bounty hunter Transformer bother affixing two halves of a Lamborghini logo to his chest so when he turns into a car he’s a cool Lamborghini? I guess even intergalactic bounty hunters care about Earthly luxury and status.

The answers to any of these questions, if they exist, would likely only provoke more annoying questions. Anyway, Bay and Kruger certainly don’t bother to create anything remotely resembling coherence or legibility, so why should we try to tease any out? The film makes some attempts at winking to the audience with what I’d have to imagine is deliberately corny dialogue, but those clumsy stabs at ironic humor actually just serve to aggravate more. Oh so you know this is terrible, and yet you’re still pummeling us with incomprehensible action sequence after incomprehensible action sequence until our eyes and ears are bleeding? Thanks a lot.

By the time we get to China (a plot turn that exists solely to appeal to Chinese ticket buyers) and Optimus has rallied some ancient Dinobot Transformers to his cause (they are Transformers that turn into dinosaurs instead of cars, I guess because they’re really old?), the movie has lumbered so far into the land of loud and meaningless tedium that the only thing to do is close your eyes and pray for a meteor to wipe us all out. There is nothing wrong with a big, silly blow-’em-up. But when something is as cynically empty and thoughtless as Transformers: Age of Extinction is, it soars past goofy summertime diversion and starts to feel like an act of nihilism. In striving for nothing but “more”—more explosions, more robot slo-mo scenes, more up-shorts shots of 19-year-old girls, more ethnic stereotypes and crass and clunky one-liners from John Goodman–voiced robots—the movie becomes devoid of anything.

There is nothing to watch here, nothing to grab onto or hook into in even the simplest of ways. I staggered out of the theater feeling assaulted and insulted, but by the time I was standing out on 42nd Street in the muggy summer evening air, even those angry feelings had passed. Terrible as they are, when these Transformers films finally, blessedly go extinct, I don’t think we’ll remember them for very long. At least we have that to look forward to.